Helpmann Award Nominations
WITH 41 categories of nominations and an Oscars-style presentation night at the Lyric Theatre, Star City on July 28, the 2008 Helpmann Awards is clearly still stuck in the dark ages of “bigger is better”.
The gongs will be punctuated by performances from shows hoping for either a box office boost or brownie points (Phantom, Rocky Horror, Billy Elliott, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady) plus the Australian Ballet, Ana Marina, Ray Crowe, NG Twins, Vanessa Amorosi and the Umbilical Brothers.
The event will be “televised live on the Bio Channel Foxtel” apparently, which may or may not mean more viewers than Nine’s Footy Show. It makes you wonder whether those responsible have ever managed to stay awake through televised Royal Variety Performances or, more recently, poor Nelson Mandela’s tragically dreary 90th birthday concert. The only light in what will otherwise be a long, long Helpmann night are the MCs: Jonathan Biggins and Julia Zemiro.
The concept of “national” awards is bizarre anyway. It doesn’t happen in the USA (where performance awards are centred on Hollywood (movies) and New York (Broadway and off-Broadway); nor in the UK where the Oliviers are centred on the West End.
Why does anyone think national awards can be anything other than unworkable and therefore – let’s be frank – irrelevant?
For a start, the likelihood of the nominating “judges” having seen all or even nearly all nominees in a category is virtually nil. That means productions and artists in Sydney and Melbourne, or better still, that have travelled to both cities or further, will always have an advantage over those whose run was confined to Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide.
The only exception is probably an Adelaide Festival year when a lot of interstate people will have been to SA. Hence the nomination for Andrew Bovell’s (wonderful) When The Rain Stops Falling, in the Best New Australian Work category.
At the same time, in Best New Oz, alongside three stage plays (Bovell plus Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls and Michael Gow’s Toy Symphony is Gideon Obarzanek’s dance work, Glow). Que? How do you judge “best” between a dance and a play and come up with a result that isn’t ridiculous?
Why have a dance category anyway when there is already a well established set of specific dance awards? The result in the Helpmann nominations is a shortlist that pits the internationally acclaimed Akram Khan against Dancenorth’s Gavin Webber. No disrespect to Webber, but there is a reason why F1 cars don’t race against go-karts. Both would be able to win in their own brackets, but there is nothing sensible to be gained from pitting them against each other. If Webber wins, it looks parochial; if Khan wins it’s cultural cringe.
Nominating visiting performers and shows is a vexed issue anyway: what is the point of nominating Akram Khan? Or the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch? Or NTS’s Kate Dickie for her performance in Aalst? What does Australian performance gain or learn from that? They were brilliant, yes. But so what?
Also nominated in the Best Female Actor in a Play category, with Kate Dickie is Catherine McClements (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Genevieve Picot (Rock ‘n’ Roll) and Leah Purcell (The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table). Amazingly there are no dancers among the nominees, although Purcell has been known to do a mean shimmy on occasion.
It does come back to who makes the judgements, however, and on what basis. The Australian Dance Awards list the selection panel on their website for all to see. They are “eminent dance professionals with representation from all states and territories” and they’re on the panel for three years. More than that, Ausdance undertakes to provide DVD recordings “wherever possible” of performances not seen by farflung members.
This does not happen with the Helpmanns and the sometimes outlandish nominations and winners are the result. In 2007, for instance, all shortlisted nominees for Best Play were from Sydney, which would be a joke unless you happened to be in or responsible for shows that happened in other cities. And you could play “guess which category” for nominations that bracketed Nigel Jamieson’s serious and politically significant Honour Bound with the acrobatic, physical circus fun of La Clique. (Honour Bound won, by the way.)
However, if there were a category for Most Eccentric Bracketing of Dissimilar Works it would surely have gone to the 2007 Best New Australian Work category which lumped in The Lost Echo with The Adventures of Snugglepot & Cuddlepie and Little Ragged Blossom (groan), Structure & Sadness (Lucy Guerin’s dance work), Honour Bound (almost uncategorisable), the Richard Mills, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Lindy Hume opera The Love of the Nightingale and Australia’s favourite musical of all time, Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
How could you choose between them with a straight face and good conscience? Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright “won” with The Lost Echo but it’s hard to believe it’s one of their most cherished gewgaws.
We can only wait to see what happens this year. All nominations are on the website www.helpmannawards.com.au. The dance award nominations are on www.ausdance.org.au.
And the Sydney Theatre Awards (disclosure: of which I am proudly a part) will be announcing its nominees for 2008 on December 21 with the Best and Most Economical Awards Ceremony taking place on January 19, 2009. Watch this space.
